Datastorm Rally - Tampa Lazydays

Sure feels weird being at a Datastorm Users rally ... our 5th one ... and not having a working Datastorm :-( Our 5 yr old modems finally died a couple months ago. We have a spare, new, modem but we need a new controller in order to use it. It just doesn't make sense to put out money now, when we know we have good Wi-Fi for the winter - and we can use our cell phone when we're away from the park. We'll probably get it fixed when we head out on the road again in the spring ... maybe.

It's still a great rally. Anyone who has a Datastorm should be required to come to this rally at least once. The education is so good. Representatives from Motosat (the company who makes the Datastom) are always participating. And not just any representatives! The Vice President, Royal Lamb, is here as well as Maurice Rojas, a senior technician who can fix anything!

Maurice is presenting sessions on understanding the technology and troubleshooting. Royal is giving sessions about the company. For the troubleshooting session, they set up a live system - with the satellite dish out on the sidewalk outside the seminar room and the controller, modem, and router in the room for demonstration.

From Lazy Days DataStorm Rally

From Lazy Days DataStorm Rally

From Lazy Days DataStorm Rally

Meanwhile, we're giving at least one of our seminars every day. Monday was our Picasa seminar, Tuesday I gave a different one, "Building a Basic Website." I play the part of Goldilocks, saying that Blogger is TOO SIMPLE, Dreamweaver is TOO HARD, but WordPress is JUST RIGHT. It's way too big a topic for an hour and a half seminar, I doubt that it will become one of our regular seminars, but it was fun for this group. At least I had fun!

Here's the full album of photos.

btw- if you're interested in how I got that ©www.geeksontour.com on every picture, see our Picasa Tip-o-the-Week this week!

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All about people

Shortly after parking here at Lazy Days Rally Park, a friendly face came into view. Bob and his wife, Honey, came to our classes in St. Paul this summer. Honey learned how to make a blog and she joined our Geeks on Tour online classroom ... check out her blog, she's doing great! Beautiful pictures Honey! And what a great story. They've had a tax preparation business for many years. So, they've now organized their life to travel 7 months out of the year. They stay home and work hard for the 5 months of Tax Season. Here they are ... I really enjoyed spending some time getting to know them (and their 3 cats!) today.

From Geeks on Tour Blog photos for November 2008

And they weren't even here for the Datastorm rally! Just pure coincidence that they were parked here today and saw our motorhome come in. This afternoon the rally began and we met a couple who remembers us from Hutchinson Kansas in summer of 2004. He says that we shared our Datastorm Internet connection with them at the time and they loved it. They now have their own and they put it to good use home-schooling their teenage kids while living on the road. We had a great pot-luck dinner and then came my 'Icebreaker Treasure Hunt.' Each person had filled out an Icebreaker card with a couple of personal facts, but no name. I handed out those cards and told people to ask questions of each other until they found the person who matched their card. With just a little bit of confusion, the icebreaker served it's purpose quite well. It got everyone up and mingling. I was happy. The winner found 8 matches in about 40 minutes. An example of one of the facts written by someone attending the rally ... "My signature is on Mars." Wow - he used to work for Lockheed Martin on the Mars lander. All members of the team put their signatures on some part of the lander! You just never know who you're going to meet at RV rallies!

From Geeks on Tour Blog photos for November 2008

From Geeks on Tour Blog photos for November 2008

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Exercise on the Road

We've been walking every morning while we're parked in Fort Lauderdale. It feels so good! But, that is usually the first habit to go by the wayside once we're traveling.

We stayed last night at a park in Fort Pierce, FL and we've never been here before. We have no idea what is around and how far we could comfortably walk. But, we've actually gotten to the point where we *want* to walk in the morning - so we got out Google Earth and took a look around. We ended up walking for 2 miles according to Google Earth. I'm so proud of us!!

To see exactly what I'm talking about with Google Earth, you can watch this video I made a while ago:

We're staying at this park because it's owned by the same management company that owns the park in Fort Lauderdale. This one is actually a trailer park, but there are a few RV sites, and they're considering putting in Wi-Fi to attract more RVers. Jim said he'd check it out - looks easy enough if they want to do it. I'll put Jim to work! Meanwhile, it's on to Tampa today and the Datastorm Users Rally.

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Rally Icebreaker

We're on the road today! On our way to the Datastorm Users Rally in Tampa. Our very first rally - actually, our very first road trip in this RV, was to the Datastorm Users Rally in Tampa in November of 2003. And, we've been to this rally every year since except one. This is our rally!

At the last rally, I told the organizers that I loved the rally but I wish there was some more activities aimed at helping us get to know one another. At every rally we go to, we are surrounded by fascinating people, but we don't know them! And, I feel pretty funny just going up to someone and saying, "Hi, tell me what's interesting about you!" Actually, I have done just that - and I'm usually glad I did.

If you've ever participated in volunteer-organized events like rallies, you know what happens when you ask for something to be done, right? You're told, "Sure! Go ahead." :-) So, I am the committee chair - and the committee - for icebreaker activities. I want to tell you what I've come up with and see if you've ever done anything like this. Did it work? Got any further suggestions?

So - when people first check in to the rally, I'm going to ask them to fill out an index card with the answer to 2 questions:

1. When was your very first RV trip and where did you go?
2. What is a little known fact about your life? or What is your favorite sport?

The index cards will all be numbered, and I will keep a master sheet with just the numbers and the name of the person who filled it out. When they fill out a card, I'll put a colored dot on their name badge. All the cards will go into a bucket. At the 'Meet and Greet' opening event, everyone picks a card from the bucket and sets about to find that person. When they find a person, they put the card back and pick up another, marking on another sheet that they found that person. Whoever finds the most people wins! What do they win? I'm not sure about that. I know there are lots of door prizes, maybe I can get one earmarked for the icebreaker rather than raffle tickets.

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Ballots: Paper, Electronic, or Florida?

It was the infamous 'hanging chads' of the punch card ballots in 2000 that prompted a switch to fancy electronic 'touch screen' voting systems in Florida for the 2004 election. They spent millions of dollars for these fancy new machines and then simply junked them because they didn't have a paper audit trail. Why they didn't have a paper trail, I don't know. It doesn't seem to me that it would be so difficult to have the computer spit out a printed 'receipt' after you vote? But, they didn't ask me.

We didn't get to experience these machines because we were in Roswell, New Mexico during election 2004. The aliens abducted our absentee ballots there - but that's another story!

So how are we voting in Florida today? Back to paper! Yes, we have a regular paper ballot where you fill in the bubble next to name of the person you're voting for. You might think that would be cheap and low tech.

Au contraire! We took advantage of being in Florida this time and voted at a booth rather than absentee. Let me describe our experience. We voted last week during Early Voting. There were 11 voting locations set up throughout the county This means that multiple precincts were handled by each location. Each precinct has a different ballot, so, they had to individually print them out! First you handed your ID to one pollworker who swiped it and verified your eligibility and your precinct. She gave us a receipt to take to the worker at the printing machines. The receipt was entered into the printer and it spit out a perfect 4-page ballot. We took the ballot to the booth and filled in our desired bubbles with a black ink pen - not a #2 pencil.

Last, we took the ballots to an optical scanner, where we fed them into the machine and saw a message that they were successfully scanned.

So ... is this scanned paper ballot a good compromise? Or the worst of both worlds?

I'm hoping for the best. It's about time Florida got it right. It sure seems to me that the day is near when we'll be able to swipe our fingerprint on any Web-connected computer and be able to register our vote. Or use the cell phone, like on American Idol! Not only does that not cost the public anything, they actually *make* money when people vote for Americal Idol. Voters dial a 900 number which costs a dollar or so. I don't believe there are any controls over how many times a given person can vote however ... that could be a problem :-)

If you want to read more about the paper/touch screen/scanner controversy, here is a good article.

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